"We analyze financial collapses, such as the one that occurred during the U.S. Great Depression, from the perspective of a monetary model with multiple equilibria.The multiplicity arises from the presence of a strategic complementarity due to increasing returns to scale in the intermediation...

This paper identifies two types of market failures. The first concerns a coordination problem associated with panics. The problem in analysing this type of market failure from a policy perspective is that there is no widely accepted method for selecting equilibria. The second market failure...